Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden.
It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring ... light shadows bamboo leaves ... practice calligraphy ...
Be the brush be the paper be the ink ... Zen.
Omar and Akiko entered a student cafe for pan, butter, strawberry jam and coffee. The place hummed with readers, writers, calculators, talkers and dreamers. Students checked their phones to tell time. They told time where to go. Silent time told them to eat faster and get their sweet ass to class. White gamma rays bathing the room sang through skylights.
I visited Ashiakawa on the island of Hokkaido one fall, said Omar. Speak memory, said Akiko. Beached summer red and yellow canoes were tied up for winter. Ducks and mallards rested on water. Women gathered leaf shadows along wide paths. At a Shinto temple on a small island an old brown structure imposed its sentinel protection. Sacred space.
There was a Tori gate, cement bridge and guardian lions in the small courtyard. Crows cackled. At the temple was a square stone basin of water with four wooden ladles resting on a crossbar. A single cup of water dipped and poured back into the basin created a visual ripple effect. A drop on the surface released a thousand colors as a golden and brown pebble bottom exploded. One drop created smooth colors before emptiness and stillness.
A visitor dropped single splashes. Ephemeral beauty. I inspected paper prayers and 1,000 white crane offerings fluttering near stone steps. Two women arrived at the water basin, drank deep, spat water out, walked up steps, clapped their hands three times, bowed in prayer, clapped three times, threw coins through wooden slots into the temple, clapped twice, walked down stone steps and threw remaining water on stone lions, laughed and crossed the stone bridge. Leaves floated reflection shadows in the world.
Akiko laughed, I don’t have a particular god.
The Dali Lama said the only true religion is one of love and kindness, said Omar.
I understand.
They walked to the Playa de la Caleta beach past a shit-covered statue of Simon Bolivar on his bronze horse singing his mercenary exploits in Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Cuba, and Bolivia. They felt sand below a blazing sun. Men in blue coveralls raked and shoveled trash into a wheelbarrow. Violent foaming wild southern flanks of green blue black sea smashed rocks. East water was calm.
Spanish women under umbrellas knitted gossip with bright red yarn. Memory cards captured digital coastlines, long human shadows and a solitary cane as an elderly person performed her rebirth in water transformation therapy.
She swam to Kampot, Cambodia and married a pepper farmer. She gave him twins named Alpha and Omega. She taught them Spanish and oral storytelling magic. They introduced her to orphanages and Zen meditation practice. She swam back to Cadiz to find her crutch. It was gone.
Tavia Tower next to the Music Conservatory displayed a 360-degree perspective with tight white Moorish cubist homes slanting into cupola cathedral spires tolling eternal songs.
Religion is larger than human existence because we promise eternal salvation, said a friar, a monk and adept Brahmin.
History’s ocean was vast, spectacular, sad and incomprehensible.
Akiko cried farewell. Waving into an empty blue sky Omar vanished in Islamic, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Shinto shadows. Akiko’s energy spirit, strength, freedom and dignity was a sweet memory called the past. Stable and fluctuating mirages.
Playing his Honer blues harp in the key of C he wandered deserted Cadiz noon streets singing about a train leaving the station with a red light on behind. Taking my baby away. All my love’s in vain.
Good love story said Tran.
After they cut out my tongue I started writing script.
I found a compressed black Chinese ink stick with yellow dragons breathing fire. I added a little water to a gray stone surface and placed the ink in the center.
Using my right hand as Master Liu in Chengdu taught me I turned the stick in a clockwise motion. Black ink ebbed into liquid. A drop of water rippled a pond.
I picked up my long heavy brush with pure white wolf hair. After soaking it in water for three minutes to relax it’s inner tension I spread out thin delicate paper.
I placed my right foot at an angle, left foot straight, my left palm flat on the table with fingers spread.
I dipped the brush in the recessed part of the stone to absorb ink then slowly dragged it along an edge removing excess.
I savored the weight and heft. My brush has it own personality character. There are at least 5,000 characters in my written language.
I have much to learn and a long way to travel with this unknowing truth.
I stood up straight, took three deep breaths and exhaled into emptiness.
I centered my unconscious on the paper filled with nothing. My wisdom mind of intent became water. It was quiet, calm and still with concentration and focus.
I listened to brush, ink and paper. I am a conduit.
Be the brush, be the ink, be the water, be the paper.
Each essence is pure, free, clear and luminous.
My useless tongue flapped in the cold December Himalayan wind. Stories and songs were birds. I heard children laughing and singing. Playing with strings of word pearls they greeted each other in the babble of nothing.
They dream with eyes open.
When we are asleep we are awake.
I memorize ancient chants with black ink soaking through parchment skin.
I am not of this world.
I sit with a diamond in my mind. It reflects 10,000 things. It is free of the five dusts: greed, anger, pride, hatred, and jealousy.
I sing my tongue-less body electric.
Where do I park this empty vehicle?
I have paintings, poems, stories, translations of oral traditions to finish that I haven’t even started yet.
If I had more time I’d make them shorter.
Leo and Lucky sharpened sticks on stones. They carved paleo-Leo-lithic paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots.
He carved his name inside out for historians and archeologists to get the EOL gist, or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, English On Line.
They connected dots forward.
Salvaged garbage mired in mud created a recycled art project on the canyon bottom. They assembled a statue using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, feathers, needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, used condoms, fractured leaves, bird songs and Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa.
Dirt play was a welcome respite from class tomb drudgery.
They practiced meditative Zen mindfulness.
A voice was missing.
Dozing, it concealed inherent pixel images of sad-eyed curious children trapped behind educational gates near women struggling behind plows and oxen or bent over Butterfly sewing machines threading conversations and manufacturing tongues in village shoe factories years and lives away from wealthy cities and dummies in display windows.
Lucky nurtured an indoor jungle in his university apartment and watered playful artistic English growth with two kids, Bob Dylan Thomas, 10, and Isabella the Queen of Spain, 12, from Human Province.
Interior. Their parents operated a popular student restaurant featuring boiled noodles. Slurping eaters' gazing befuddlement observed the three geniuses speaking and laughing, ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha.
Laughter is perfect survival therapy.
After a dinner of steamed fish, rice and fresh spinach he introduced chess tactics/strategies to freshman every Friday night in a cafe overlooking student street near new campus.
It was a mishmash of seventy-five restaurants, shops, beauty salons, karaoke night clubs and fruit and vegetable stalls amid rancid street garbage filled with malnourished savage scavenging dogs competing with humans foraging for sustenance outside high cement walls, rusty guard gates, cement dormitories, miles of flapping laundry and blue lakes leading to a Buddhist temple on a green mountain reflecting a yellow sunset.
“You've noticed,” said a waif castling early, “how the majority of Asiatic eaters drop their faces into the bowl to eat. Very few raise the food to their mouth. It's not about taste and camaraderie. It's about finishing it.”
“Eat fast or you starve. You’re either fast or last,” said Lucky, developing the Queen’s pawn.
Embrace fear, uncertainity and doubt.
*
Pedal to spa
Twenty minute sauna 57C / 134F
Plunge pool 5C / 41F
Floating
Garden zone
Relax
Repeat x3
Daily meditation
A flower has profound responsibility.
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